Fast fashion is a metaphor for the modern clothing industry's model of copying recent designer trends, mass-producing them at cheap cost, and making them available in stores quickly to meet customer demand. And for a price that is "obtainable" for everyone.
Fast fashion is like fast food, it gets you what you want now, cheaply and with minimal effort. It is meant for a quick turnaround, and not intended for qaulity nor longevity.
Fast skin care is much like fast fashion: it is cheap, easy and without quality. It is meant to get you what you want now from a trend report you read in an online article or a post you saw from a celebrity on Instagram. It is meant to follow the fads, be mass produced and widely sold to quickly meet your latest demand at the price you can afford to buy the most of it, the most often.
Junk on a shelf.
But in the end, like fast fashion, fast skin care means endless consumerism, endless waste and no satisfaction. Fast fashion's cheap and trendy quality means that you wear it a couple of times, it gets ruined in the wash and the fad has passed, you no longer want it so into the landfill it goes. Fast skin care means you buy tons of those little bottles of serums, cleansers and lotions in your pursuit of that "look" you want, use them a couple of times, and when they don't live up to their "hype", or make your skin worse, into the trash they go.
And on to the next.
Toxic Skin Care
Investigation into the fast fashion industry has discovered toxic contamination in the fibers of clothing from cheap retailers. Contaminations include lead particles within the fibers, pthalates and Perfluoroalkyl and Polyfluoroalkyl Substances (PFAS). Exposure to the above can cause cancer, endocrine disruption and brain damage.
Fast and cheap skin care is also contaminated because it is produced at the lowest cost, with the lowest quality materials, and packaged in the cheapest bottles without concern or steps taken for cleanliness and warehoused for years. As a result, cheap, mass produced skin care contains mold spores, fungus, bacteria and benzene which goes on and in your body and poses a health concern with long term consequences.
Furthermore, fast and cheap skin care often uses a high concentration of fragrance/essential oils, silicones, polymers and alcohols. Which, on their own cause a slew of skin disease from acne, to contact dermatitis to skin cancer.
One Product, 1000 Labels
Whether you buy a new serum or lotion from a leading brand, or a dermatologist-branded product, or one by a celebrity's new skin care line, the product is the same. It is the same as the one you can find at the discount retailer or the one you can buy on Amazon or the one you can buy at the luxury cosmetic counter at a top department store. The reason is private label.
Private label is the practice of creating a "stock product" with a blank label, and companies can buy that stock product and put that product in their own packaging. I have discussed the topic of private label before, but briefly an example would be: if you go to Whole foods and see Whole Foods carrots in the freezer aisle, this is private label. Whole foods does not have their own carrot fields where they grow and pick and package carrots. They buy packaged carrots from a company that sells packaged carrots to other grocers, and Whole Foods puts their label on it. It is rumored that Kirkland/Costco's vodka is just private labeled-Grey Goose. Where Grey Goose Vodka sells their surplus stock to retailers like Costco, but without the Grey Goose label, and Costco puts it in their bottles with their label and sells it at a lower cost.
With private label skin care, you are getting the same lotion, serum or cleanser that millions of other people are getting, but your difference is a bottle, a label and a fragrance or a drop of oil. You also get it at a different price depending on the packaging/brand.
Fast skin care has led to the rise in private label skin care products because you can mass market a single formula. The problem is that mass produced products from the same formula means you are always buying the same product, but just in a different package. And when you are always buying something, thinking it is different, but getting the same thing, you just buy more and more. You waste more and more, and you are never happy with what you have, because none of it works.
At least one of these products is private label. Can you guess which?
When I do consultations with customers a pattern is present: customers always say "I have tried everything and nothing works." But when they tell me the products that they use, its clear that they haven't tried anything at all. They have tried one product, marketed in 1000 different ways. That lotion that they have tried for dryness? Thats the same lotion used by the brand for the last 10 years, only with a new fragrance and different bottle. That anti-acne serum made by a dermatologist? Thats the same product you can buy at Walmart only in a sleeker bottle. Or that skin care product that the celebrity supposedly uses to make her skin ready for the red carpet? She doesn't use that, she just gets paid to say she does.
Private label is cheap, it is meant for mass production and mass consumption at a low cost. It is meant to follow the trends and to be discarded just as quickly, and in the end the customer is left worse for wear while the brands that sell them are reaping the rewards.
If you are always wanting, you are always troubled
Fast skin care creates the psychological dilemma of endless desire. Because fast skin care is so cheap, available and trendy, it invites you to be constantly buying in the hope that maybe this one product will be "the one." But "the one" doesn't exist in fast skin care.
Fast food seems like a cheap and easy way to get what you want quickly. For $10-15 you can eat now and be on your way. But that daily cost of 3 fast food meals a day adds up. Someone who eats fast food every day spends $10,000 a year or more on food, where if you were to buy your food at the grocery store that bill would be cut in half. The health consequences of eating fast food daily also add up to severe medical bills from heart disease, diabetes and other insalubrious effects from a fast food diet.
Fast skin care also seems like a cheap and easy way to get what you want quickly. You have a skin concern such as aging, dryness or acne, so you search online, see that little $20-30 vial of product from a trendy store and buy it, try it, and toss it a few weeks later. Or it sits in the shelf next to the other losers that didn't live up to their promise.
Fast skin care also always creates a fad to sell you something new because none of it works. Skin care companies will pay to get articles in big name publications talking about some new trend like probiotic skin care, neuropathic skin care, skin care for winter skin, skin care for summer skin, skin care for anxiety, etc.
You read about it, think you need it, get it and into the pile it goes. Its cheap cost makes it obtainable, its cheap cost makes it so you can mass consume it, and its cheap cost makes you guitless when you don't like it and throw it away after it sat in the pile with the other mountain of useless products.
It all contributes to waste. It all contributes to endless consumerism.
Fast skin care promises everything and does nothing. It promises to be the solution to acne, it promises to anti-age and it promises to make you love your skin. But fast skin care, with its cheap ingredients, in plastic packaging with its stock formula just give you false hope in a bottle and endless waste in the landfill. The psychological effect is as long-lasting as its carbon footprint: you just buy more and more, and your happiness and bank balance is less and less.
Fast skin care in the long term is expensive and destructive.
Fast skin care just creates an addiction to shopping and that constant visit to the skin care aisle in the hopes that maybe there will be that new bottle that'll end all of this desire.
That bottle doesn't exist. It never has and it never will in fast skin care.
How to identify fast skin care
Fast skin care has particular qualities that separate it from high quality skin care.
Fast skin care is cheap.
If you are buying natural skin care, with a high amount of high quality ingredients sourced in the proper way, the cost is high for the company producing it, and that means your cost will be high if you want a good product. If you have a "natural" serum, lotion or skin care product that is sold at a price comprable to what is seen in a big-box or discount retailer, it is fast skin care.
It is simply not possible to produce a product with an abundance of high quality natural ingredients at a discount price. If a company did that, they would go out of business within one year. If a company makes the claim that they are using the best ingredients and the highest concentration, but their price is at the bargain level, then either their ingredients are adulterated, processed low quality material or they are lying to you.
Now this is not to say that higher price means better, I would say most luxury brands are quite bad in a skin care sense as well, but luxury brand's high price means they are not fast skin care. A higher price point means less production, less consumption and therefore less waste. If every handbag costs $5000, then there would be a lot less handbags on the planet.
Fast skin care is plentiful.
Fast skin care brands have many products, too many in fact. There is no need for a skin care brand to carry 20+ "different" products in their catalogue. Skin is skin, and what makes it healthy is all the same and there are very few measures that need to be taken to make it healthy and keep it that way. So if a brand has tens or hundreds of products, this is a sign that they are a fast skin care company. Their formulas are purchased from private label, or they are just a variation of an earlier or existing product with just a new fragrance, bottle or drop of oil. And this allows them to endlessly churn out more and more products for you to buy, use a couple of times and discard.
Fast skin care brands also mass produce, instead of companies like OUMERE who make their skin care in exclusive volumes every day, fast skin care makes their products in batches of 40,000 gallons, factory bottle the product and warehouse shelve it for years. The result is a stale product with dead ingredients.
Fast skin care is trendy.
Skin doesn't change, the skin you have is just like the skin somone had 100, 1,000 or 10,000 years ago. It has the same basic needs and reacts in the same way. So the concept that skin care needs to be changing with every season like shoe styles change every season is bogus.
The only reason for skin care trends is to just create more products for more profit. Since 99% of skin care products do not work, the industry needs to constantly create new trends to keep you hunting and consuming.
A fast skin care brand will always keep up with the trends to keep you coming back when that last product didn't work out so well.
Have less, but have the best
The concept of Nirvana is to remove yourself of all desire to achieve happiness. I do not completely agree with this because it is good to work towards having nice things. It is a reward to work hard and to be able to accomplish something that you want. But there is something to be said about removing the need to always want something because when you are constantly buying, and constantly wanting, then you will never be happy with what you have. So if you rid yourself of this constant need for shopping, then it is a step in the right direction.
With fast skin care, you will always be on the hunt for the next purchase. Fast skin care is garbage, and no one is happy with having garbage. So you are always wanting more and cannot understand why you have so much skin care and it is never good enough.
And what is worse, is that your little purchases here and there add up at the end of the day and you end up spending more for nothing. It is better to save long term, buy less but high quality and love what you have.
With OUMERE I wanted to go against the new normal in skin care of a fast, low quality product sold for mass consumption. I wanted to create what I believe was the best product, with the best ingredients in the finest packaging to make your skin look its best. I researched each ingredient and tested the products over years from a formula created in the lab I built. It is a rebellion against the established way of doing things but I believe it is the right step forward.
With OUMERE the days are over of endless shopping, endless consumption and endless disappointment. The products in the OUMERE system are what you need for your best skin in a minimal routine so you can do what you need to do to get your best skin and get on with your life. No more shopping, no more trends, no more waste.
I believe in a less is more approach to skin care, it is how you can finally look and feel your best.
